How to Spice Up Your Love Life With AdWords

Romance is a lot like marketing. You put yourself out there and hope your offering catches the interest of your target audience.

This is true even after the initial courtship phase. If you stop wooing (also known as advertising in the business world), the romance dies. Even if brand loyalty keeps your significant other hanging around for a while, the relationship really doesn’t go anywhere.

On the other hand, if you want to build passion for your personal brand, you have to remind them of your unique value proposition and encourage them to invest more in the partnership. That’s Marketing 101, my friends!

With that in mind, I’ve been trying to improve my marriage lately and—while pondering on the similarities between marketing and love—it occurred to me that I had an incredible romantic resource at my disposal: Google AdWords!

Now, AdWords isn’t exactly designed to be a courting platform, but Disruptive has a reputation for figuring out creative ways to meet our clients’ needs, so I knew we could find a way to use my passion for PPC to spark my wife’s passion for me.

The Untapped Potential of AdWords

Despite the parallels between marketing and romance, the romantic potential of one of the internet’s most powerful marketing tools has been completely ignored. Sure, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are widely used to woo, but what about Google AdWords?

AdWords dominates the rapidly growing online advertising industry for good reason. It has a huge reach, excellent tools, fantastic targeting options and is easy to set up and run. Given the effectiveness of AdWords as a business marketing platform, it stands to reason that it could do wonders for your love life!

Converting AdWords’ advertising potential into romancing potential takes some creativity, but—as is usually the case with AdWords—the results are worth the investment.

So, without further ado, let Doctor Jake show you how to spice up your love life with AdWords…

Put the “Woo” in AdWoords

To test out whether or not AdWords would work for romancing, I put together a campaign for my best friend and wife, Teresa. I’ll use some screenshots from my campaign to show you how to set things up.

To get started, we need to put together some great ad copy. Like any good AdWords ad, there are three main things you need to do to succeed: 1) Get Personal, 2) Speak to the End Goal and 3) Highlight Your Offer.

1. Get Personal

As John Kurakoa puts it:

[Tweet “The second-best word is “you.” The best word is the customer’s name.”]

Normally, “you” is as good as you can get with an AdWords ad; but, in this case, you actually know your target audience’s name, so put your sweetheart’s name in the ad! It’s hard not to notice an ad with your name in the headline.

In addition, if you know something specific about your audience, including that in your ad copy is a great way to help a viewer identify with your ad. So, for your loved one, try mentioning some sort of inside joke or memory that will catch your loved one’s attention.

Who knew you could flirt on AdWords?

2. Speak to the End Goal

Great ads resonate with the reader. They speak to your audience’s end goal—what they hope to get out of clicking on your ad.

It often works well to phrase this as a question. For example, “Rekindle the Flame” doesn’t make the reader engage in the same way that “Ready to Rekindle the Flame?” does. You want your sweetheart to think, “Yes, that’s me! I am ready to rekindle the flame!”

3. Highlight Your Offer

Now for the clincher, it’s time to give them a reason to click. You don’t have to spell everything out for them, but you need to tie their pain point (the end goal) to your offer. In essence, an AdWords ad should evoke the following emotions from the viewer:

The goal here is to create feelings of love, passion and a renewed desire for your company, so speak to that with your ad copy!

Landing It

Once you’ve piqued their interest, you need to seal the deal with a great landing page. Effective landing page design is the secret to online advertising success, so you don’t want to waste all the potential of that hard-earned click on a lousy landing page.

There are a lot of great ways to put together a landing page, but one of my favorites (especially if you’re a little less tech-savvy) is Unbounce. Unbounce allows you to quickly and easily put together the kind of landing page that will make loved one go, “You put this together for me?”

To make sure you get the most bang for your buck, there are a few key elements you’ll want to include in your landing page: 1) a Call to Action, 2) Consistent Messaging and 3) Supporting Evidence.

As a reference, here is the landing page I put together for my campaign:

1. Call to Action

An awesome call-to-action (CTA) needs to be obvious and self-explanatory. In other words, it should be obvious what the object of your affection gets from hitting the button. Not only that, the button itself should be obviously placed and colored in a way that stands out from the rest of your page.

As much as you might want to say it, using something like “I love you” as your CTA doesn’t provide a whole lot of clarity about the purpose of your button. Get to the point. Tell them exactly what they can expect if they commit.

Of course, you might want to leave a few tantalizing details out to maintain a bit of mystery; but, overall, it should be clear what your loved one is signing up for. Mismanaged expectations is a great way to make people angry, regardless of whether they are a client or your spouse.

2. Consistent Messaging

Consistent messaging is key to advertising success. The overall message and value proposition of your website needs to match the content of the ad that brought your visitor to your site. If it doesn’t, they’ll end up feeling confused and more than a little bit frustrated, which means you won’t get the results you want.

For example, had this ad…

…led to this landing page, my conversion rate probably wouldn’t have been all that great.

However, since my actual landing page incorporated references to romance, a visual reference to flame and information about Jake Baadsgaard, the landing page was exactly what she expected when clicked on the ad.

Similarly, you want your loved one to feel like like they ended up on the right page. This makes them more open to your amorous overtures and far more likely to convert. So, make your landing page consistent with your ad copy!

3. Supporting Evidence

In addition to an effective CTA and consistent messaging, there are several other elements you can use to round out your page.

For example, in my page, I was sure to clearly state my unique selling proposition, or what my wife got for signing up. Generally speaking, it’s usually best to keep this short and sweet, so I tried to get right to the point—Romance Awaits!

Hero shots are another great way to increase the visual and emotional impact of your page. To be effective, though, the hero shot should reinforce your selling proposition, so I used a dinner photo to highlight the romantic nature of the evening and a picture of the product to increase the attractiveness of the offer.

Finally, since good social proof can go a long way towards sealing the deal, I threw in a few quotes to assure my wife that a date with me would be a good idea.

With all the right elements in place, my landing page was ready to go. Normally, I would have created a variant so I could do some conversion rate optimization, but the initial success rate was high enough that this proved unnecessary.

All the Right Ads in All the Right Places

Now here’s the tricky part: targeting. Even if you feel comfortable telling the world about your love life, you don’t want to leave your ads open to clicks (and conversions) from just anyone.

Normally, we would could narrow our audience with keyword selection; but, in this situation, we want our ads to show up for almost any search. That poses a problem that requires quite a bit of ingenuity to solve.

Fortunately, it can be done. It takes some effort, but believe me, the results are worth it.

Getting Their Attention

First off, to get your ad to show up for your loved one, you have to set it up to run on the right keywords. Since AdWords is intent-based marketing, you need to choose keywords that will match with the sort of search your sweetheart is likely to make.

Now, typically we recommend using tightly focused groups of keywords to make sure that your ads primarily show up when someone is looking for what you’re advertising; however, in this situation, we want just the opposite. The goal here is to show up on any search query your loved one makes.

I suppose you could rig things by asking your loved one to search for a specific item or enter a particular set of exact match terms, but that doesn’t quite have the romantic sparkle of suddenly discovering your ad during a random Google search.

Ideally, I would hope you know your audience well enough to put together a list of terms they are likely to search for. Just put those into the keyword list as broad match keywords, set the bid for $50/click and your ad will be popping up in front of your honey in no time.

For example, here are some of the keywords I picked for my wife:

Unfortunately, while this sort of strategy will guarantee your ads get seen, you don’t want to put your ads on display for the world and pay $50 every time the internet trolls get curious enough to click your ads (if you’ve followed my advice in the previous section, it’ll be a good ad—so, believe me, they’ll click).

For Your Eyes Only

So, to make sure you don’t pay through the nose for your loved one’s attention, you need two things: 1) their zip code and 2) their IP address.

Location Targeting

Go to your campaign and click on the Settings tab. In the Locations section, enter their zip code.

Now go to Location Options (advanced) and change the targeting to “People in my targeted location.” That way, your ads will only show up for people who search from within your loved one’s zip code.

Finishing the Job

This is where things get a bit more difficult. To avoid advertising your advances to the whole neighborhood, we have to prevent your ads from showing up on your nosy neighbors’ web searches while still ensuring that they trigger for your sweetheart.

How? IP exclusions. Lots and lots of IP exclusions.

Remember how I said you need your significant other’s IP address? This is why. We’re going to set up exclusion criteria for every IP address in their zip code except for theirs.

Building Your IP Address List

Going into full detail on how to find every IP address for a city would merit it’s own blog post; but, to get you started, here’s a database for looking up the IP addresses associated with a given city. You can use these instructions and this IP address-to-hex converter to build out a thorough IP address list in Excel that you can then paste into AdWords.

A word to the wise, building this list is by no means an easy task. But your sweetheart’s worth it, remember?

Setting Up IP Exclusions in AdWords

Once you’ve got your IP address list, go to the Advanced Settings section of your campaign’s Settings tab, expand the IP exclusions section and click Edit. All you have to do is copy over your hard-won list of IP addresses and your amorous ads are safe from prying eyes.

AdWords only allows you to exclude 500 IP addresses, so take full advantage of the wildcard option to make sure that you stay under the limit.

That’s it, you’re ready to go!

Putting It All Together

With your amorous ad copy, love-filled landing page and tantalizing targeting in place, get ready for some lovin’. Now all you have to do is turn on those campaigns and put the spice back in your love life!

Hopefully your conversion rate will be as good as mine was, but if not, there’s always retargeting…

By the way, if you’d like to find out how our AdWords management company can put a little spark and creativity into your campaigns, let us know! You’ll be amazed at the results you get from a little heartfelt advertising.

Now it’s your turn. Did this work for you? What are some other creative ways you’ve seen people use AdWords?